Are You Doing $1,500 Per Hour Activities?

Dallas: “I know our team’s not really efficient in how we work,” Jan began as we walked to the lunch line, “We do a really good job for our clients and, I think I know what you’re going to tell me, but it’s difficult for me to let go of certain things.”

I can feel Jan’s pain, as I’m sure so can many of you. Jan is facing the classic advisor delegation dilemma. Rather than give her a lecture on the importance of delegation, which she’s heard many times in the past, I took her through an exercise of determining what her time was worth.

This is not a complicated process if approached from a relationship management-relationship marketing perspective. I asked Jan to tell me about the last affluent client she’d acquired. She smiled broadly and told me about a $4.5 million dentist whose wife was a close friend of one of her clients. You can do the math; a nice recurring stream of revenue.

So think of the last affluent client you’ve acquired.

Let’s revisit all that was involved. In Jan’s case, she was introduced to this opportunity at a social event; she and her client were volunteers at a charity event. At some point during the event Jan was personally introduced to the dentist’s wife.

From there, relationship management (Jan with her affluent client) and relationship marketing (Jan, client, and dentist’s wife) became fully activated.

This isn’t the place to review every step of Jan’s relationship marketing over the six months it took to transition that new relationship into a client – but the reality was that she romanced her $4.5 million opportunity.

I asked her calculate the hours she spent in this relationship marketing process (romancing the $4.5 million). She didn’t know. I asked how much time she spent managing the relationship of the client who first introduced the dentist’s wife. Again, she didn’t know.

How much time did you spend in acquiring your last affluent client?

If you were personally introduced by a client or COI, how much time did you spend last year managing that relationship?

I asked Jan to think about all of this because this was the type of activity she needed to spend 70 percent of her time doing; managing the relationship of her top clients and relationship marketing. The other 30 percent would be devoted to leading her team. Also, I asked her to email me the value of her time on an hourly basis, if she was spending 70 percent of her time engaged in the above.

About two weeks later, Jan informed me that she assessed her time at $1,500 an hour. And this has “prompted me to let go of all those smaller dollar per hour tasks that had been the root cause of my team’s inefficiency.”

You can do the same. Let’s commit to those $1,500 per hour activities!